On the most Holy Day of the Nativity of the Lord when the King rose from praying at Mass before the tomb of biased Peter the Apostle, Pope Leo placed a crown on his head and all the Roman people cried out, “To Carolus, pious Augustus, crowned by God, great and peace giving Emperor of the Romans, life and victory.” And after the laudation he was honoured by the pope in the manner of the ancient princes and, the title of Patrician being set aside, he was called Emperor and Augustus.

Of all the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire the most renowned, the first to receive the golden Imperial Crown from the hands of the Roman Pontiff, no Emperor has so captured the Catholic imagination as Carolus Magnus, the Emperor Charlemagne. The beginning of the Sacred Ages might truly be dated to his coronation on the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord. Born on the second of April in the year of Our Lord 742 in the realm of Austrasia, Karol (as he was named in old Frankish) was the oldest son of Pippin the Short, King of Francia and Patrician of the Roman Empire. Upon the death of King Pippin in A.D. 768, Karol and his younger brother Karloman jointly ascended to the Frankish throne, in the midst of a rebellion in Aquitania.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers…. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death…

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Courage is the fundamental virtue of Chivalry, and one of the foundational virtues of Civilization. What exactly is courage? It is the unbreaking soul that has passed the breaking point of despair, firmness under the stress of every evil, resolve in the face of Death himself. And this ultimate Courage is only possible to him who has Love of True Life, Faith in what is Good and Free, and the Hope born of Faith in Final Victory.

Going through my copy of Cardinal Seldon’s important and monumental work, Imperial History, I came across two very interesting full color illustrations. Both are texts in the form of stylized Sacretemporal (Medieval) Manuscripts, and both inscriptions are in Old High German. The inclusion of these illustrations in color suggests that the book was very expensive to print, though no records of the productions costs of this book can be found.

The first is the Sacretemporal (medieval) text of the Prophecy of Six Crowns (my translation of which can be found here), compiled from various chronicles into a single text. The text is found in the chapter entitled The Rise of the House of Austria, and underneath the text is a pseudo-heraldic symbol representing the Prophecy:

The second illustration contains the original Old German text of the enigmatic poem, Wolves with the hair of Ermine, which is (like the other text) followed by a series of pseudo-heraldic symbols, representing the first ,second, and fifth verses of poem, which is found in the chapter entitled The Fall of Rome:

The translation on the facing page reads:

Wolves with the hair of Ermine
Crows that are crowned as Kings
Though these things be many as vermin
ONE shall outlast these things

In the mountains an EAGLE shall rise
The Flag of the Desert shall burn
Renewed forever shall be old allies
And the KING TWICE CROWNED shall return

Surprisingly, no translation is given for the third stanza, which I can only assume is the lost stanza beginning A Sword shall be his token, in which case it is extremely interesting that no translation is given, as no complete version of the stanza is known to exist. It is also noteworthy that these verses are referenced as being attributed to a certain Blessed Heinrich Arnhold von Heiligwaldenstein, though no other records or mentions of this personage can be found.

After the death of Conradin, the grandson of the heretic Frederick II, the Empire was thrown into a lawless chaos now called the Interregnum. Men forsook the laws that had governed them and turned to robbery and violence, especially in the region of Southern Swabia (now Switzerland) near the High Rhine and the Aar. Below follows a proximate translation of the history of Count Rudolf IV von Hapsburg, taken from the Chronicon Helveticum (which in turn was taken from earlier sources such as the Chronik der Königsfelden ):

The Ritter (Knight) Hartmann Von Aue, who is considered today one of the three Greatest Imperial Poets, was a Crusader, a songwriter, and the author of several narrative poems, among them the profoundly beautiful Epic of True Love, Der arme Heinrich (if you have not read this great work, I encourage you to at least familiarize yourself with the story).

Herr Hartmann was very much a man of his times, especially in his view of women. In modern times we are taught to look down on the Sacred Ages, with their alleged oppression of women, yet it is precisely in modern times that we see women oppressed, and forced from their natural complementarity with men. The true Sacretemporal view of women as in a very true sense equal and complementary is most beautifully expressed these few lines of Hartmann’s profound poetry:

Glory be unto her whose word Sends her dear lord to bitter fight; Although he conquer by his sword. She to the praise has equal right; He with the sword in battle, she at home with prayer. Both win the victory, and both the glory share.

One of the Greatest of the Sacretemporal (Medieval) Hapsburgs, Rudolf I was the eighth Count of Hapsburg, and the son of Count Albrecht IV, born on May 1, 1218. Upon his father’s death on Crusade in 1239, he inherited the Hapsburg lands in Aargau and Alsace. A just count and a holy man, he had a personal devotion to the Holy Eucharist, which would be passed on to his descendants. A faithful Catholic, he was nevertheless briefly excommunicated for supporting his godfather the heretical Emperor Frederick II and Frederick’s son Conrad IV, however the excommunication was soon lifted upon Conrad’s death in 1254 Continue reading →